Japanese is the official language of Japan,
which has a population of over 125m. There are also around 2.5m people of
Japanese origin, many of whom speak Japanese as their first language, living in
Brazil and the rest of the Americas, particularly the United States. One also
finds a sizeable expatriate presence in major cities such as London, New York
and Paris.

In Japanese just like English, words have no
gender. Japanese doesn't use articles as prolifically as English does and
there's no way of showing whether a word is singular or plural. E.g. the
word 友達 [tomodachi] can mean a friend, the
friend, friends and so on. Sounds confusing, but once you get the hang of it,
this actually makes things a lot simpler.

The most obvious challenge is probably learning
the characters, but unfortunately, there's no getting around them!
However, if you want to stick to spoken Japanese and just learn the Romanised
script, then it can be a lot easier than learning many other languages. There
are no pronunciations or tones to remember and each syllable is given equal
emphasis.

Getting used to Japanese grammar can be a
bit tricky because of the word order, which is Subject Object Verb. Great
if you're used to other languages, such as German or Turkish which have similar
word orders, but possibly a little confusing for English speakers unfamiliar
with it. So, the verb is placed at the end, meaning a simple sentence like
"I watch television" would be "I television watch".

A knowledge of Japanese will help immensely if you
intend to learn Korean as the two languages are grammatically very
similar. Chinese is very different in this respect although learning
the Japanese characters would prepare you for the bigger task of learning the
Chinese ones.

Along with the language skills, a softening of the
voice, a discreet awareness of the other person's personal space and
undemonstrative body language go a long way when it comes to courtesy and
showing respect in Japan!​